A Perfectly Geeky Weekend

The Boy Genius and I just had the official Best Weekend Ever. For a pair of geeks that is.

We started out on Saturday night at the Westchester Amateur Astronomers‘ monthly star party. Details are here but do allow me to brag about finally hitting my own personal White Whale – the Leo Triplet – without any computerized or motorized means. Plus we saw that rarest late evening site – the planet Mercury hanging low over the horizon.

Yesterday we headed up to Duchess County for the Mount Beacon Amateur Radio Club’s hamfest. We spent an hour or so rummaging through boxes of vacuum tubes and diodes and lusting over old radios and finally settled on a copy of the ARRL’s license manual and test guide for the technician class license. So if the boy gets his technician class I definitely have to upgrade to general. Time to relearn everything I forgot.

Pictures from the hamfest (with appropriate snarky comments for the Hamsexy crowd) are here.

Since we were already up north and not far from the Newburg Beacon Bridge, we headed to the other side of the Hudson after lunch and drifted south on 9W, past Storm King Mountain and West Point and ending up at Bear Mountain. We spent some time taking note of glacial marks on the rock outcroppings up on top of the mountain, took some pictures and admired the view.

And to top it all off, since he’s finished The Fellowship of the Ring, we’ve been watching the movie in bits and pieces (and it’s much better than I remembered it and I remembered it being pretty good).

Now back to work.

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